Appcelerator Raises $15 Million Series C Round

Appcelerator, makers of the popular mobile cloud development platform Titanium, has raised $15 million in Series C funding in a round led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital and Red Hat. Existing investors eBay, Inc., Sierra Ventures and Storm Ventures also participated in the round.

The additional funding will be used to expand Appcelerator’s Titanium product line, with an emphasis on adding HTML5 mobile Web capabilities to its offerings. It will also help the company expand operations in Europe and Asia.

Appcelerator will be opening a U.K. office in Q1 2012 and is working with Translink, a firm with a strong Asian presence, to enter Japan, Korea and Greater China. According to Appcelerator VP of Marketing Scott Schwarzhoff, 40% of its developer base is North America, 40% is from Europe and the rest is “other.” So for Appcelerator, establishing a European office is mandatory, he says.

The company also took the opportunity to provide an update on its growth. It now has 30,000 mobile applications on over 30 million mobile devices in its portfolio and 1.6 million developers in its ecosystem. This makes it if not the largest, then certainly one of the largest, mobile development platforms in existence today.

More remarkable, perhaps, is how quickly the growth was achieved. The number of apps represents a 6-fold increase over 2010, the number of devices is a 12-fold increase over 2010, and the number of customers is a 10-folder increase, with the addition of 1,000 new customers in the past year. Some notable recent additions include NBC, eBay, Medtronic, GameStop, Merck, Progressive, Reuters and Harrah’s. The company has also grown from 17 employees to 100 over the past 12 months.

Schwarzhoff says that around 30% of its customers are enterprise clients, and that number is growing. Another 30% are midsize companies, he adds. These clients increasingly want an integrated solution – one codebase that works across platforms, but not a “write once, deploy everywhere” solution.

With Appcelerator, they take the “80/20” approach instead, meaning 80% is common code and 20% is unique to a given platform. This allows the publisher to take advantage of platform-specific features like Android’s intents, or iOS’s notifications. Going forward, that approach will continue on the backend, but on the UI side, Appcelerator is working on introducing more HTML5 capabilities through a new declarative UI which will allow it to compile the UI into a native UI.